Queer Stories of Europe Queer Stories of Europe

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature. Eds. Ellen McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, forthcoming.

SEXTURES: E-journal for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics, 2014

A review of: Queer in Europe, edited by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011, 232 pages.

While exclusively female societies are often sympathetically portrayed in modern utopian narrative and in science fiction, imaginary societies where male homosexuality is the norm have usually been portrayed as dystopias. Already in the Middle Ages, the attempted establishment of an exclusively homosexual male community by a fictional prince in the romance Berinus is violently rejected. Some modern narratives present an apocalyptic and dystopian future where masculinism, misogyny and normative sex/love between human males are conflated. Moreover, normative male gayness in speculative fiction often involves the totalitarian oppression of (heterosexual) ―natural‖ impulses. Confronted with such negative depictions of male homosexuality in its collective dimension, gay-minded writers have rarely provided interesting alternative utopian scenarios until recently. Furthermore, most of these have favored inclusion in an ideally open and inclusive society within our world, rather than to propose full-fledged utopias as free-standing societal constructions.

2006

"The paper presents the presence of English homosexual authors in Polish literary studies mostly aimed at students of history of English literature. From a review: As indicated in the opening paragraphs, queer theory and broadly LGBTIQ approaches have been finding new homes as well as finally being given voices in publication. One such from Poland, edited by Dominika Ferens, Tomasz Basiuk and Tomasz Sikor, is the second in what is hopefully a series. It is suggested in the introduction to the slim volume Out Here: Local and International Perspectives in Queer Studies that it builds on its predecessor because more of its authors address the local context of Poland and Eastern Europe. This is obviously welcome in and of itself, but additionally so because viewpoints from Poland are rare more generally as a result of prejudice against Polish immigrants in Western Europe. Of the essays focused on Poland, Krzysztof Fordoński’s ‘Handling the Touchy Subject: Dealing with the Author’s Alleged or Actual Homosexuality in Polish Studies in the History of English Literature’ gives numerous examples where historical, contextual material for literature studies, apparently deliberately, has left out or misled readers on the subject of author homosexuality. Interestingly, the contextual texts in which information about the non-heteronormative desires of authors does appear are almost all in English, rather than Polish, meaning that the breadth of the picture is only ever likely to reach Polish university students who access English rather than Polish sources, and certainly not the wider Polish population whose access is limited by the lack of working knowledge of English (p. 36). Shamira A. Meghani, 'Queer Theory and Sexualities', The Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, The English Association, 2010"

De Gruyter eBooks, 2022

lambda nordica, 2018

Romanian literary accounts of queer characters are scarce, and the few critical texts that do address them often dismiss the discourses revolving around the author's or the character’s sexuality. The Romanian academic community still espresses virtually no interest in studying queer aspects of the humanities, and there is a very limited number of articles written on this theme by Romanian scholars. Even these were mostly published not in Romania, but abroad. Therefore, I aim to present and analyze a series of literary works beginning with Panait Istrati's novel, Adolescența lui Adrian Zografi (Adrian Zografi's Adolescence) to contemporary writings by Ioana Baetica Morpurgo, Cristina Boncea, Ana Maria Sandu and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. I will discuss the mechanisms through which queer stories are constructed and how the stereotypes concerning non-normative sexualities function inside the texts, as these are mainly authored by heterosexual persons. The memory-related value of the primary sources is of great importance to this paper. At the same time, the literary characters which I encountered in my research can be read from a queer perspective (in some cases, their sexuality is only presented in the subtext). Through the interplay of these fragments —of lives and of fictions— I aim to nuance the local expressions of queerness. This analysis is strictly connected to the socio-political and legal contexts of our local history and will be conducted using a feminist approach and perspectives from the field of literary studies.

More than any other, the idea of normalisation has provoked deep divisions within queer activism both at a philosophical and also at a political level. At the root of these divisions lies the irreconcilable divergence between an agenda for social change, which advocates the need for society to accept all sexual behaviours and identities as normal, and an approach of radical resistance against some social structures that can only offer a bourgeois and conformist normalisation. Literary fiction and homo-gay-queer themed cinema have explored these and other sides of the idea of normalisation and have thus contributed to the taking of decisive steps: from the poetics of transgression towards the poetics of celebration and social transformation. In this paper we examine two of these literary normalisation strategies: the use of humour and the proliferation of discursive perspectives both in the cinema and in narrative fiction during the last decades.

Comparative Literature Studies, 2021

This article is a comparative reading of the novella Verwirrung der Gefühle (1927) by the Austrian author Stefan Zweig and the novel Følelsers forvirring (1937) by the Norwegian author Borghild Krane. While both titles translate as Confusion of Emotions, and both deal with the fates of homosexuals, this is the first study to ask how the connections between the two works create literary meaning, and what this might imply for the textual mode of existence of homosexuality. Employing poststructuralist theories on the textuality of sexuality, this article argues that interpretation of linguistic and cultural signs is fundamental to the idea of homosexuality in the European inter-war years. Positing the existence of a homocultural code, the article explores in depth how the ability to understand and reproduce a particular system of references is depicted as vital in understanding same-sex attraction. Moreover, the article argues that the way Krane intertextually connects her novel to Zweig's novella should be read as symbolic of how the homosexual condition is marked by the mastering of various codes.

2014

Cook and EvansÕ anthology offers a rich analytic assemblage of urban queer culture in Europe from 1945 to the present time. Although its temporal focus requires further conceptual substantiation, the work is generally effective in analysing queerÕs complex socio-spatial dimensions. This is particularly done in the domains of politics, mobility, migration, tourism, democracy, religion, language, sex, health, prejudice and justice that have been structurally intersecting urban queer culture over the last seven decades or so. Across genders and academic stages of career, the contributors approach these matters of urban queer culture from anthropological, historical, gender, philosophical, sociological, linguistic and legal epistemologies.